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A comment on Plunging costs make solar, wind and battery storage cheaper than coal. Parent comment

Re:Plunging costs make solar, wind and battery storage cheap... by dsfyu404ed on Monday January 29, 2018 @01:34PM (#16259532)
>And according to something I read from the US Dept of Energy, one of the big reasons for that is reckoned to be over-regulation.

Yes. This is non-negligible part of the problem. There's lots of regulation and that plays right into the hand of the incumbents (utility companies) who can use that regulation to make it harder to compete.

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Re:Plunging costs make solar, wind and battery storage cheap... by KirinDave on Monday January 29, 2018 @05:30PM (#16261225)
And many of these subsidies are actually protective of existing energy industry that wants to enforce connectivity to the grid.

California in particular had a relatively quick plummet in power demand that actually caused older parts of the grid to start breaking. PG&E despite having used negligence to set a bombs with gas line negligence and kill dozens of dogs with electrified ground plates argued they couldn't cut into profitability, and started forcing people to reconnect to the grid even if the customer would exceed the maximum buyback cap PG&E offers (as I understand it, not a homeowner so this specific part is only my reading).

Result is protectionist nonsense that greatly reduces the profit margin of solar for individual installs.

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